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One of Dickinson’s most famous romantic/erotic poems, dating to about 1861. While working on the 1891 edition of her poems, her friend and posthumous editor Thomas Wentworth Higginson fretted in a letter to his co-editor, Mabel Loomis Todd:

One poem only I dread a little to print—that wonderful ‘Wild Nights,’—lest the malignant read into it more than that virgin recluse ever dreamed of putting there. Has Miss Lavinia [Emily Dickinson’s sister] any shrinking about it? You will understand & pardon my solicitude. Yet what a loss to omit it! Indeed it is not to be omitted.

Higginson was neither the first nor the last reader to project his own hang-ups onto Dickinson.